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A report today, directly from Sony, estimates that the PSN outage has cost the company in excess of 14 billion yen, or $170 million. This estimate is based both on the loss of business due to the unavailability of the PlayStation Network and the costs of retooling security and bringing the network and PlayStation Store back online.  While this figure is staggeringly huge, it only represents the cost directly to Sony. The ripples of the outage are already being felt by the game development community as a whole, whose ability to sell any of their online-only content has been completely nullified by the network’s downtime. For developers without boxed retail releases—whose livelihoods are entirely dependent on their ability to market and deliver titles online through venues such as Steam, the Xbox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation Store—a month-long outage can present a serious financial risk. The PSN is already back up, and the PlayStation Store will be returning to active duty on May 24. Of course, with the return of the online store comes all the free stuff, including downloadable titles, as an apology for this unexpected lapse of PSN service. |